Do you like to survive in minecraft whilst being completely enclosed by bedrock on all sides whilst some distant god poses you challenges that may or may not be relevant to the aforementioned task of survival? Any minecraft survival map player with a love of deeply specific and quite challenging challenges is going to love Super Enclosed Minecraft Survival Map, which is 1.4.5 compatible and uses the command block to add a little more zing to the map as you know it.

You begin the map and live the map in a naturally generated minecraft village, complete with villagers who like nothing better than trampling their own crops and trading with you. The feature that sets this map apart is the challenge room, a place you are ported to at the press of a button, where your successful challenges are rewarded with glowing lights.

One finds oneself wearing the map maker’s head as a mask at the outset, which I found to be a charmingly gruesome touch, one that endeared me to the map as a whole. The challenge room is an excellent idea that not only focuses play, but gives the player a sense of accomplishment and redstone validation. There is a certain amount of glitchiness to this room, but if you cheat, you’re only cheating yourself. (And as there is a surprise I won’t spoil for anybody who completes all the challenges, you really will be cheating yourself if you claim victory before it is yours – in the most hilarious way.)

Would you like to battle it out with your friends inside a minecraft map that looks like a game you used to play when you were much younger? Of course you do. Super Smash Bros is a legendary Nintendo game, and this Minecraft homage to that PvP extravaganza will have you laughing all the way into the void. So choose your weapon and get ready to battle for supremacy through five separate stages including remakes of Hyrule Castle from the Zelda franchise and Saffron City from the Pokemon behemoth that has swallowed the chilhood culture of more nations than I care to count.

With specialized armor, bonus weapons and occasional input from the maps themselves as they spawn mobs you may or may not wish to do battle with, but have to anyway, this is an excellent way to spend a fine afternoon knocking some of your closest friends about the place with all the grunting and bone crunching sounds minecraft can muster.

You begin your journey trapped in a pocket of air in the lower corner of the sky aquarium. The sky aquarium is a small place, a place where one tree grows a few meters away and where the constant press of water makes breathing difficult.

What makes this map hard is the relative lack of resources. At first glance there are no animals, no grasses, no wheat farms, no mushrooms, not a whole lot of food of any kind in fact. Small pockets of ore do exist, but they are not easily found and the player will have to create ways to hold back the waters in order to harvest their bounty.

Although this is a tiny map, I found it to be one of the more enjoyable sky survival maps thus far, perhaps because exploring the small reaches of this little map took an awful lot of engineering, and when I found those precious deposits, I felt a glow of achievement difficult to attain in a world where one takes air for granted.

Woah. From the very first inkling of the very first screenshot of the Inkstar minecraft adventure map one can’t help but be blown away by the scale, intricacy and sheer design chops displayed in this map’s builds. It puts most other minecraft maps to shame, it puts most real world buildings to shame. It puts shame to shame, that’s how incredibly impressive this adventure download is.

This map is so large, so incredibly complex that the creator recommends Optifine be used to run it. It also comes with a custom texture pack to show the builds in their best light. (Optifine will also assist in running the 32x textures that are bundled with the map download.)

How did such a fantastic minecraft world come into existence? Why, dragons made it of course. That explains the scale of things, although I’m not entirely convinced that dragons have the opposable claws necessary to realistically build these monuments to dragon architecture.

This map is so large that it comes with not one, but two downloadable maps to help you navigate around the place (one of which is over 5000 px wide, over twice the size of your average monitor) as you take a tour of a minecraft world that will make all your builds seem like dirt shacks in comparison. That’s what I look for in a minecraft world download, something that makes me feel about as creative as some mud on a stick. Some of the cities in this map are so large it is actually impossible to render them all at once, even from the giddy heights of the sky.

But it’s not just epic builds that make this map fun, it’s also the technical aspects that are impressive. As in Bethesda RPGs, fast travel has been added to the game, simply reach a fast travel pillar and right click it in order to activate a fast travel point. This saves days of traipsing back and forth between points because you forgot your enchanted sword in another castle.

Save the Cows is a goal oriented Minecraft Survival Map. You begin your journey as a pilgrim to Palm Island, where you had planned to simply leave a tribute to the local god and return to the ocean as an adventurer. But as you leave your offering, you can’t help but notice two cows marooned in the distance. The god of Palm Island has long forbidden the consumption of beef, but if you can rescue those cows, you can return tasty steaks to the world at large.

In the process of saving the cows, you discover that the Palm God has wreaked watery havoc on a nearby village. Can you find the survivors, and perhaps resurrect a legendary thoroughbred pig?